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ON THE DEATH OF JULIA CALLAN-THOMPSON

Everybody knows there are a million stories in the city and yet most of them remain untold. Local newspapers are a good source for backdated gossip but often these publications lack both the resources and the motivation to properly investigate the stories they pick up. For anyone who shares my interest in the London counterculture, the weekly back issues of The Kensington News & Post from the sixties and seventies are a valuable resource. Here one can find lurid tales of drugs, squats, hippies, bent coppers, black power, prostitutes and much else that resulted in figures both famous and obscure being hauled up before London courts, or sometimes less unhappily dealing with local reporters after they’d issued a press release.

The running story in the Kensington News at the end of 1979 was the hunt for a school boy Martin Allen who'd been missing since 5 November. The lead feature of Friday 7 December 1979 concerned a fire close to Westbourne Grove which resulted in seven people who lived above the Rhodes Restaurant being plucked to safety from the flames that engulfed the building. Other stories covered that week included a call by Labour Party councillors for the neo-Nazi organisation The League of St. George to be banned from holding meetings in municipal buildings. However what most interests me in the 7 December 1979 edition of The Kensington News is a tiny paragraph tucked at the bottom of an inside page. Under the heading 'Found Dead' are these words: "Julia Callan-Thompson was found dead in her basement flat in Cambridge Gardens on Sunday December 2. Police say there were no suspicious circumstances. She was middle-aged." There was no follow-on reporting in subsequent editions of the newspaper.

Who was Julia Callan-Thompson? My interest in her stems from the fact that she was my mother, but given her long involvement with bohemianism and the drug subculture, her biography is also closely bound up with many of the things that continue to fascinate all of us about the swinging sixties. My mother had an action packed and sometimes troubled life. She was thirty-five when she died but having been separated from her as a child, I only learnt of her death twenty-three years later. By chance as an adult making a living as a writer I'd established professional and social relationships with people who'd moved in the same circles as my mother. As these overlaps became apparent to me, I found myself in a position to learn a great deal about her.

In my mother's Post-Mortem Examination, Dr. Iain West records that she was: "A well nourished woman, 5' 6" in height, looking considerably older than her stated age. There is a healing injection mark on the front of the left wrist, this is of several days duration. No evidence of fresh injection marks. There are multiple old scars of the veins of the fronts of both elbows and some scarring over the wrists including some horizontal scarring over the proximal part of the right wrist."

Julia Callan-Thompson died in the back basement flat at 104 Cambridge Gardens on 2 December 1979. She was found dead in bed at 6pm by an American friend Mary Jane Duchene. The Coroner's Officer PC Peter Weyell records the authorities as having spoken to only two of my mother's friends in the course of a cursory investigation into her death. Both these women, the aforementioned Mary Jane and a Nina Trott, knew at the time they spoke to the authorities that my mother had undergone withdrawal from heroin three weeks before she died; and both were of the opinion that heroin may well have played a role in her death. Nonetheless rather than noting this, PC Weyell opted instead to use my mother's fraudulent 1975 job application for the post of social worker at The Blenheim Project as conclusive proof that her use of drugs was well in the past at the time of her death. Since my mother appears to have been known to PC Weyell prior to her death, I have difficulty understanding how he overlooked the incongruities contained in this document. For example, my mother had been a club hostess since she was a teenager and I find it surprising that someone in Weyell's position would accept at face value her claim in the job application that she was awarded an MPhil by University College London in 1966. A simple phone call would have enabled Weyell to establish that my mother had never been a postgraduate student at UCL. Indeed, my mother had never attended a university, let alone gained postgraduate qualifications from what was in the sixties considered one of the best academic philosophy departments in the world.

My mother had a history of involvement with frauds, and PC Weyell should have been able to access information about this if it wasn't already known to him. Had he done so, I would have expected it to lead him to query the veracity of the information on her Blenheim Project job application. Most cops working in west London in the late seventies would have recognised the first referee on this document as a leading figure in local drug subculture, and Alex Trocchi's name alone should have aroused PC Weyell’s suspicions about the truthfulness of a job application in which my mother claimed to have overcome her addiction to opiates in the early seventies. Likewise, I find it hard to envisage any competent police officer failing to find something dubious in a registered heroin addict applying for a job as a drug worker that entailed them making prison visits to jailed junkies. My mother also falsified her date of birth on the application and this slippage alone should have aroused suspicions about its veracity. One of the consequences of PC Weyell's flawed work was that no toxicology was performed on my mother’s body, and given the circumstances in which she died there clearly should have been one. If a toxicology had been carried out it seems likely the results would have led to a public inquest into her death.

The autopsy performed on my mother was a purely visual examination. As a consequence, if shortly before her death she had been injecting heroin into some of the less immediately visible parts of her body, such as between her toes, the resulting scarring would have been neither seen nor noted during the course of her Post-Mortem Examination. As a  result my mother's death was certified as being due to natural causes, more specifically bronchopneumonia. Since something will invariably be found in the lungs after death, bronchopneumonia is often given as the cause of death in instances when nothing else can be established; or where those in a position of authority prefer not to do a proper investigation for whatever reason. It is a banality to state that death is always the result of the failure of a major organ, and from a legal standpoint what should be determined by the coronary process is the chain of events leading to the fatality rather than its ultimate cause. Paul Knapman who oversaw the investigation into my mother’s death states in the third edition of Thurston’s Coronership, which he co-authored with Michael J. Powers, that bronchopneumonia alone should generally only be treated as a cause of death among the elderly or the homeless. By the late seventies the authorities were perfectly well aware that in west London it was not uncommon for deaths from bronchopneumonia to be brought on by an overdose of drugs. In such cases the law requires that the circumstances be properly determined and if there had been an overdose then an inquest into the death should be set up to establish among other things whether this was accidental, suicide or the result of foul play.

The general comments at the bottom of The Coroner's Officer's Report into my mother’s death are the most curious part of that document. They are wildly inaccurate and read as follows: "The deceased woman was separated from her husband (sic) who now lives in Hong Kong (sic) and residing at the above address (i.e. 104 Cambridge Gardens) alone (sic). There is a long history of addiction to drugs but well in the past (sic). No recent indications of this at all (sic). She was found dead in bed at 6pm on Sunday 3.12.79 (sic) by a friend Miss Mary Jane Duchene who then called the police. Miss Nina Prott (sic) is also a friend who stayed with her last week and observed that she seemed quite well although she had a bad cough. Enquiry re relatives still continues."

On the basis of the report drawn up by PC Weyell, the then deputy coroner Paul Knapman was satisfied that my mother was not addicted to drugs at the end of her life. This despite the fact that the Post-Mortem Examination states there was a healing needle mark a few days old on her right wrist. In most instances when a drug addict dies it seems unlikely anyone is going to question what the authorities record about the circumstances of their death, and this may account at least in part for the shoddy way in which PC Weyell conducted his investigation. Weyell didn't record and possibly didn't even know that Mary Jane Duchene was able to gain entry to my mother's bedsit because the street door that gave direct access to it was open. This certainly provides grounds to arouse suspicions that foul play may have played a role in her death; a more thorough investigation might have determined whether or not this was the case.

If, as I think likely, drugs played a role in my mother's death, then the trajectory of her life does offer insights into why she died at an early age. There is no single reason why my mother was addicted to heroin. That said, she moved in a milieu where both hard and soft drugs were readily available, and she was greatly pained by the fact that she was separated from me. Heroin was one means of dulling the anguish and guilt she felt about me. A quite separate factor is that from the early sixties onwards my mother was engrossed in spiritual matters and her quest for knowledge about other realities spurred her on to experiment with various mind-altering substances. In the beatnik circles in which my mother moved, drugs were seen as a short cut to enlightenment. To someone from outside the counterculture it might appear strange how frequently addiction to heroin went hand in hand with new age religious pursuits, but within the hippie milieu, this state of affairs generated little to no comment. During the sixties my mother was attracted by the Subud movement, whose followers sought spontaneously achieved contact with God. In 1972 she joined The Divine Light Mission and she was involved with this body of followers devoted to the teachings of Shri Guru Mahara Ji for the last seven years of her life.  In early November 1979, less than a month before her death, my mother flew from London to Orlando in the United States where she was one of thousands of Divine Light Mission devotees who flocked to Florida for a religious festival lasting approximately ten days. Nina Trott recalls running into my mother's ex-boyfriend Bruno de Galzain at the Orlando event, and being told Julie was there but in a bad way because she was suffering from heroin withdrawal. Nina didn't see my mother during the festival because Julia was in bed doing cold turkey.

Mary Jane Duchene who did spend time with my mother in Orlando has provided me with the following recollection: "I actually found out about Julia’s heroin issues when we were flying to a Divine Light Mission event in Florida, from the UK, in the fall of 1979, just before her death that same year. We hadn't booked the flight together, but we met up on the plane. She told me at that time that she had been using heroin and that she was in withdrawal and ill, and asked me to help her. We shared a motel room for the week long event. She felt strongly that she wanted to stop using heroin and was on her way to the Divine Light Mission event to reinforce herself spiritually so that she could succeed. Julia was very ill throughout the event but enjoyed it tremendously. She communicated with many Divine Light Mission friends about what she was going through with heroin and about her resolve to change. She said it had always been difficult to be in recovery and that she definitely wanted to kick heroin. Julia was very brave and strong in enduring the physical pain involved with withdrawal. I admired her for her strength and perseverance in overcoming this adversity. After we returned to London, Julia and I kept in close touch."

Bruno de Galzain, who'd been my mother’s chief lover from the mid-sixties to mid-seventies, was extremely concerned about her well being in the last weeks of her life. He was living in the south of France, and he asked Nina Trott who lived in the south-west of England to travel up to London to check on my mother. Nina was thus able to provide me with the following recollections about the room in which Julia died: "The flat in Cambridge Gardens was a basement flat. I think it was just a bedsitting room with a kitchen and bathroom. I can vaguely remember a galley-type kitchen. It was a fairly large room. It wasn't furnished or decorated in any style I can particularly remember, but it was comfortable and quite cosy and warm. There were pictures of Mahara Ji on the mantelpiece, but Julia would have had those wherever she lived from 1972 onwards. I remember sitting on the floor with her for hours and hours talking, me with my back to the window, Julia opposite me. All this is etched into my memory because I must have gone over and over that day in my head afterwards, in light of the fact that it was only three days before she died. It must have been about November 29th. I vividly remember her going out quite late, about 11.00pm and then coming back at about 2.00am. Then we talked some more and then went to bed, both of us in the double bed because there wasn't anywhere else for me to sleep and she didn't have any spare bedding. Next morning she didn't have to rush off anywhere so we talked for another few hours and then I went off back to Bath in the afternoon. I had the definite feeling she didn't have all her stuff there, quite probably Bruno or her family were looking after most of it."

My mother was a shrewd judge of how various individuals would react to things they might learn about her, and in the last years of her life she was determined Bruno de Galzain should not know of her ongoing affair with a guy called Grainger (AKA Malcolm Drake). Bruno did not approve of this heroin dealer and pimp, and had he learnt my mother was living with his main rival for her affections from the sixties until her death, it would have become a bone of contention between them. To ensure that Bruno didn't find out she'd rekindled her old relationship with Grainger, my mother had to keep it a secret from anyone who was close to him. Thus Nina informed me: "The flat was Grainger's. Presumably Julia was living there with him at the time, although I didn't realise it was his when I spent that night there. Judging by the timing, he must have moved out shortly afterwards, quite possibly because of the associations." Soon after my mother's death Grainger relocated to what one of his heroin buddies described as 'a pokey council flat in the Elephant and Castle'. The distance in miles between Ladbroke Grove and the Elephant isn't great but the ambience of these two districts is completely distinct. I have been told by some of those who knew Grainger that he was very 'cut-up' about my mother's death, and it seems his move from west to south London was at least partially prompted by it.

Mary Jane Duchene who found my mother's body told me: "We often went to Divine Light Mission meetings together, and that was the reason I found Julia the night she died. I was supposed to meet Julia to go to a meeting, and she didn't turn up. This was unlike her so I decided to go around to her flat, assuming she had been delayed and would still be there. When I got there, the door was open and all the lights were on. I remember she had a ground floor flat, situated in the back of a house or block. Julia was lying on her stomach with her head to the side, and I don't think she was clothed, but she had a sheet partially draping her body. I thought she was sleeping. I tried to wake her, and got no response. I called the emergency number for an ambulance immediately. When the emergency services got there, they said she was dead. At the time I had no idea of what had happened, and really anything I say now is still probably speculation. I guessed that her death had something to do with heroin but couldn't be sure. I never saw the autopsy report and wasn't contacted further by the authorities. However, I did get a telephone call from Grainger some time after this. This surprised me as I did not know he had my number. The call was odd and he thanked me for not mentioning his name to the police. What this means I don't know, for sure, but from that call I felt, or believe, that he had been with her when she died. To be fair, I really did not like Grainger, so I was abrupt with him on the phone."

Elaborating, Duchene said that when Grainger called: "He just thanked me for handling things and not mentioning him and confirmed the obvious, that he would not have been able to handle the official matters because he was a junkie. He didn't say how he got my unlisted number, he knew about Julie's death, he knew I had found her or anything else. It was a brief call. He did seem sad and upset that Julie was dead. Emotionally I was not open to Grainger and felt that had Julie not been involved with him she would have had a better chance of getting off heroin, so I have to admit I have some bias against him." Mary Jane then moved on to more general observations about the authorities: "The ambulance people and police on the scene seemed to handle Julie's death in a routine way. They took my name and phone number and I waited with people upstairs or in the front of the house, Julie's neighbours, for some time before I asked the police if they needed me for anything further, and then I left. I suspect with Julie's history that the police knew very well that she had been an addict and may just have assumed it was an overdose, or assumed it was pneumonia and did not look into it too carefully."

Neither Grainger nor Geoff Thompson (who'd cohabitted with my mother between 1961 and 1966, albeit with several long separations over these years) attended her funeral at Llantarnam Crematorium outside Newport in south Wales. However, Bruno de Galzain with whom she'd enjoyed one of the two most important relationships of her life attended the ceremony and then spent a few days with her family in Newport. Other people involved with the Divine Light Mission who were close to Bruno - including Nina Trott - had gone ahead with their plans to visit America for Maharaj Ji's birthday, and de Galzain was waiting for them to return to Bath. When Bruno left Newport he took my mother's ashes with him and went to stay with Nina. After a few nights in the west country, Bruno asked Nina to hold out her hands and close her eyes. De Galzain gave Nina the urn holding my mother's ashes and asked her what she thought he'd put in her hands. Eventually, he told Nina that he'd given her Julia. Then they both started to laugh because the ashes weren't Julia, they knew she was so much more than these remains. While he was in Bath, Bruno took my mother's ashes to bed with him at night. After staying with Nina for a week, de Galzain went to the grounds of a large house Maharaj Ji owned in Reigate and scattered my mother's remains there.

Nina says: "I think the key to understanding Julia especially in the last part of her life, is in the split between her two lives. The life as a premie (a follower of Guru Maharaj Ji) and the life as a junkie, which was really her previous life but one she couldn't ever quite get away from. I also think she probably found the life as a premie a bit too safe or whatever compared to what she'd been used to. It wasn't particularly tame to be a premie in those days, but she would have missed her friends like (Alex) Trocchi too much if she'd cut off from them completely." My mother's funeral and the scattering of her ashes at what was to her a site of spiritual importance cover one side of this; the last undated entry in her diary provides the other. Pretty much the final thing my mother wrote is a poem dedicated to her boyfriend Grainger and entitled Computer in Pursuit of a Dream:

You lie there, legs straddled an easy lay
Like some 'motherfucker' (your words)
For hours you have put me through mental torture
Because I desired you
Sure I wanted love
                       anyway I could
But you denied me
                         both
                         fuck & fix
And then dropping a Tuinal, like an over the hill whore
                                                               you became an easy lay.

My mother had composed better poems, but in its raw and unstructured state this one sums up very well a side of her life that remained strangely overlooked by the authorities when they investigated her death. Since my mother's diary was among the few of her possessions to be found in the room in which she died, it was anything but inaccessible to PC Weyell. Again, I find it difficult to envisage a competent police officer looking at this last diary entry and then concluding, as Weyell did, that my mother was not addicted to drugs at the end of her life. It remains possible that the authorities failed to examine my mother's diary, although if this is the case then it is yet another serious oversight on the part of those entrusted with investigating her death. Just why the Coroner's Officer conducted his inquires the way he did strikes me as a greater mystery than the actual cause of my mother's death. That said, for the Kensington News there was nothing puzzling about my mother's death or the investigation into it. For local newspapers the police are a vital source of information and thus it is generally in their own best interests to take what the authorities tell them at face value. There are a million stories in the city and my mother’s is one of many that might very easily have remained untold.

Red Hot Hippie Momma (brief overview of Julia Callan-Thompson's life)

The Real Dharma Bums (on the beatnik frenzies of Julia Callan-Thompson & Bruno de Galzain)

Voices Green & Purple (overview of British psychedelic culture including Julia Callan-Thompson's involvement with Terry Taylor's incredible 1960s Ladbroke Grove drugs & magic scene)

Julia Callan-Thompson's time Go Go dancing in Kabul (you need to read through a bit of art guff at the start to get to this)

London Art Tripping (psychogeography of 50 years of bohemianism)

Funeral Instructions for Stewart Home (Julia Callan-Thompson's son)

The Empty Grave of Kurt Schwitters

Art/Anti-Art

Occulture

Julia Callan-Thompson working as a hostess at Churchill's Club, London, 1964

Julia Callan-Thompson working as a hostess at Churchill's Club, London 1964. Photographer unknown.

Julia Callan-Thompson fashion shot 1966
Julia Callan-Thompson in 1966.

ON JULIA'S COUSIN RAY 'THE CAT' JONES

The return of Ray Jones, the greatest cat burglar in the world, ever!
I’ve known Paul Buck for years and the other day I went to see him do a talk in which he covered his entire career as a writer, from a recent true crime book to his involvement with heavy weight French theorists back in the day. While Paul has endless tales about the innumerable highbrow chancers he has known, when we spoke after his presentation I asked him about The E… List: Notorious Prison Escapes, and specifically whether my relative Ray “The Cat” Jones had featured in it. Paul said he had covered Raymond Jones. I’ve never met Ray but he is one of my mum’s many cousins and my uncles like to talk about him. Indeed, my mother was named Julia after Ray’s mother. This is what Paul has to say about Ray in his book:

“Frankie Fraser gives cat burglar Ray Jones his vote for the best single-handed escape, when he went over the wall at Pentonville Prison,  breaking both his legs in the process and yet still getting away. Fraser gives scant details, but somehow, in 1958, Jones managed to climb onto the prison roof and, in scaling down the sheer face of the outside wall, smashed one kneecap, then fell and broke his ankle. Nevertheless, he continued, scaled another wall, and broke the other leg when he jumped.

“Still he persisted, crawling into a block of flats and making his way onto a roof, where he fell headlong through a skylight as he tried to prise it open. When he regained consciousness he made his way out of the building, pulled himself along using the railings on the Caledonian Road, crawled across the road to King’s Cross station, over the railway lines and into someone’s garden. Eventually he decided to seek help and attracted the attention of some young men, asking them to give him a lift “because I had had a bad fall.” They guessed who he was, but didn’t betray him. After they left him at his relative’s flat, his wife arrived and arranged for him to stay elsewhere, where he remained for five months while recovering from his injuries. He was not recaptured for two years.”

I’d seen the Frankie Fraser book Paul picked this up from, and I’ve come across stories about Ray in various other tomes. Peter Scott who was trained up in the art of cat burglary by Jones includes poison pen portraits of my relative in his autobiography Gentleman Thief, and there are other criminal memoirs that include tales of Ray losing large sums of money in illegal gambling dens. Typical too that a pathetic middle-class fantasist like Scott would have his account of the post-war burglary scene published; whereas Ray Jones and his long time partner-in-crime George ‘Taters’ Chatham, who between them taught Scott this trade but come from working class families, haven’t been given that kind of break - and unlike their apprentice they haven’t been handsomely rewarded for appearing on ‘reality’ TV shows like Channel Four’s The Heist either. The most recent reports I’ve heard of Ray have him living in Dalston, east London. If he’s still alive does anyone know his whereabouts?
Stewart Home blog January 24th, 2009.

Ray 'The Cat' Jones Again
My post of 24 January 2009 about career criminal Ray “The Cat” Jones caused a flurry of interest. I got a couple of messages saying Ray was dead, and further confirmation of this in a comment added to that blog yesterday:  “Ray died in 2001, just so you know.” Likewise, Neil Milkins told me: “I have made some enquiries with a nephew of Ray, Michael O’Dowd of Nantyglo. (Ray was his mother’s brother.) He said Ray died of cancer in London about 7 years ago.” To clarify my own distant relative status with the greatest cat burglar of all time, Ray’s mother was an older sister of my maternal grandfather David Callaghan (AKA Dai Callan), and my mother - Julia Callan-Thompson - was named after this particular aunt.

Moving on, Ray “The Cat” Jones appears as ‘Taffy Raymond’ in the autobiography of the old school heavy Eric Mason. After flashing up the name of Peter Scott, Mason gives an account of Jones loosing heavily in a Notting Hill spieler and then slipping out with his criminal accomplice George “Tatters” Catham to do a quick robbery. Upon their return Jones and Catham negotiated the price of a jewel with the governor of the spieler before resuming their places at the gaming table. South London gangster Mad Frankie Fraser tells a similar tale about Billy Benstead, and as a lead in to this story mentions that Tatters Chatham and Ray Jones numbered among the other leading cat-burglars who were also degenerate gamblers. As noted in my previous Jones blog, Fraser also cites the unaided escape Ray made from Pentonville as one of the greatest prison breakouts of all time;  Mad Frankie says Jones broke both legs going over the wall and still managed to get away. Elsewhere, Fraser makes a passing reference  to cat-burglar Raymond Jones having a brother known within the London underworld as Taffy Jones. But since Ray was lumbered with this appellation by Cockney villains, it may be that Mad Frankie is getting confused. In my experience Fraser and his ghost writer are not 100 percent reliable as sources.

Towards the end of his life,  Ray garnered a certain amount of newspaper attention as a kind of aftermath to  Peter “The Human Fly” Scott publishing his autobiography Gentleman Thief:  Recollections of a Cat Burglar (1995). Scott had been a small time tea leaf until Ray introduced him to major league larceny and the support network that is essential to the headline grabbing criminal. Scott incensed Jones by using his book to claim sole credit for stealing movie star Sophia Loren’s jewels when she was filming at Elstree in 1960.

In the late nineteen-nineties and using a spokesman called Michael Morgan, Jones ran a campaign to get the public to demand that the police arrest him for this 1960 burglary. Jones asserted there had been a cover-up and that the authorities wouldn’t charge him with stealing Loren’s jewels because he’d paid corrupt police officers twelve thousand pounds for information that enabled him to secure the haul. It has even been claimed that because the police knew Jones had been wrongly jailed for another burglary, they decided not arrest him for this particular theft.

Ray claimed to have nicked sixty million pounds worth of goods during his life-of-crime. Like many other underworld figures, Jones and Scott seem to have constantly bigged up their own importance. That said, Jones was an ‘honest’ working-class criminal, not a middle-class slimeball like Scott, so while Ray may have on occasion bent the truth, what he had to say is considerably more reliable than the rot on offer in Gentleman Thief.

According to gangster Albert Donoghue, Loren’s valuable gems were fenced by George Mizel whose Hatton Garden jewellery repair business was a front for this type of activity; however, many London villains active back then believe that upon examination the Loren ‘treasures’ turned out to be paste copies, and not the valuable originals. The same sources add that fortunately Jones and Scott had also lifted this Italian sex siren’s smalls and they did terrific business flogging off her underwear. Peter Scott certainly enjoyed targeting female film stars and he readily admits he got a sexual thrill from riffling through their possessions and stealing their knickers; so this tale about Loren’s paste jewels and stolen underwear is credible albeit unproven. Regardless of its truth or falsity, it certainly makes a good story.

Sources:  Eric Mason - The Brutal Truth: The Inside Story Of A Gangland Legend (Mainstream, Edinburgh 2000).  Albert Donoghue and Martin Short - The Enforcer: Secrets of my life with the Krays (John Blake Publishing, London 2001). Peter Scott  - Gentleman Thief: Recollections of a Cat Burglar (Harper Collins, London 1995). Frankie Fraser with James Morton - Mad Frank: Memoirs of a Life of Crime (Warner Books, London 1995); Mad Frank And Friends (Warner Books, London 1999); Mad Frank’s Diary (Virgin Books, London 2001); Mad Frank’s London (Virgin Books, London 2002). Seven or so years ago when I last checked Ray out online there was some local south Wales newspaper coverage of him freely available on the web, and although that has subsequently disappeared, I made notes from it at the time. That said, you can still check “Who Done It?” Independent, November 8, 1998, via HighBeam Research or a copyright deposit library -  this carries the strap-line: “Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones, who has spent more than 30 years in prison, now wants recognition for the Sixties theft of Sophia Loren’s jewels. Will Cohu hears his story”. Also available via the same sources is “Ray The Cat Book Bid,” Wales On Sunday, March 3, 2002.  For this blog entry I also made use of notes from conversations I had with Mad Frankie Fraser and various other ‘old hands’ circa 2002.
Stewart Home blog March 12th, 2009.